President Obama marked his chairing of the United Nations Security Council on September 24 with the submission of a US-sponsored resolution intended to promote the ultimate goal of the abolition of nuclear weapons. The resolution was passed unanimously by the Council. Obama is following up his promise in Prague in April 2009 to work for a world free of nuclear weapons. The UN Resolution was a little weaker than Obama may have preferred, in order to bring other countries on board.
However, it was not on the international stage that Obama has picked his first big fight in this campaign. It is at home. The field of contest is the preparation of the country’s next Nuclear Posture Review, due for completion by February next year. This will be an ideological battle of considerable proportions, both inside the Administration and outside it.
According to press reports, Obama just this month rejected the existing draft and called for a “less timid” rewrite. Assessments by insiders of the draft nuclear review say that it was directly at odds with the commitments that Obama had given to pursue less reliance on nuclear weapons and to reduce the scope for their use. Prominent specialist in this field, Joe Cirincione, wrote in August this year in the Huffington Post that “Defense officials are writing a new U.S. nuclear policy that could blow up President Obama’s declared agenda.” He called on the White House to “reassert its control”. We are already seeing the early signs of this emerging ideological battle in the visceral public reactions in certain quarters to Obama’s decision to cancel the planned deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic of parts of its global ballistic missile defense system. The move has been more or less been presented as appeasement, both of Russia and of Iran.
Just how President Obama navigates this lake of alligators into which he has set sail may be a bigger challenge than bringing universal health care to all Americans. The good news is that he has allies and his people in the right places in the Pentagon. Obama’s opponents will inevitably make claims to some form of mystical certainty about key premises of American nuclear strategy, such as refusing a commitment to “no first use” of nuclear weapons and the need to provide for strategic pre-emption. His allies will counter, as Obama signaled in Prague, that the only way ahead is to make courageous decisions for which political leaders are responsible, not the military bureaucracies that follow their orders.
As a recent blog on the website of the Federation of American Scientists noted, the “requirements” for nuclear weapons and how they are deployed and used, flow directly from the military missions that people assign them. The author noted:
 “Nuclear weapons, and their missions, have been with us for so long people forget that these “requirements” don’t come from the laws of physics but from choices we make.”
The way ahead is clear. The nuclear posture review cannot present a world of static choices about nuclear force structure and deployment. It must be a document that canvases different political approaches that provide for more flexibility in military nuclear posture as international political circumstances change.
There must be chapter on the international politics of nuclear arms reduction and confidence building for war prevention that would have to accompany any radical reductions. The United States must open talks with all nuclear weapons states on non-nuclear military strategies.
The review must also help to set the political and operational mood for a move away from military reliance on nuclear weapons. The United States is the country with greatest capability on earth to rely non-nuclear (conventional) weapons or even cyber weapons to fight what previously might have been seen as nuclear scenarios. It will be difficult, but this nuclear posture review will need to take account of “cyber pre-emption”. Writing about this in public, or even in classified sources, is going to be as difficult as it will be radical. Watch this space.